Design Thinking Digest

Teaming Class

 The Insitute of Design is a school that I recently had the pleasure of attending, completing an MDM in 2006. I recently had the honor of teaching a one day workshop at the school for students on teaming and collaboration that was based on some previous work I did that looked at the landscape of teaming and design at other businesses, schools (both design and business) and the large body printed content  that exists on the subject.

It was wonderful to be able to give back to a program that gave me so much and it was also compelling because the faculty actually participated in the workshop with the students (not a first, but rare enough that it got the student body's attention).

One of the first things I covered in the class is an overview of some of the principals identified in the book entitled Wisdom of Teams by Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith. The word team gets abused alot and part of the reason is that we often don't know what type of team to use for a given project, or how much effort or overhead it's going to take for that team to succeed.

We then discussed the variables that really need to be in place for ANY team to work, which are:

• Teams need to be small
• Teams need to have complimentary skills
• Teams need to have a common purpose
• Teams need to agree on how to work together
• Team members need to have mutual accountability

If we think about the above and our own experiences we can probably see where this all leads. In my own experience teams start to derail if I get more than seven folks working on something, if I've got more people than that it usually means it's time for me to think of breaking up a problem we're working on into smaller and more manageable units.

Complimentary skills is important too, when everyone on the team has similar skills and interests and abilities creativity and intelligent risk-taking often get left behind, NEVER underestimate the power that diversity brings to the problem solving mix.

It probably goes without saying teams need to have a common purpose. If the team leader is trying to save the world but your real goal is to make a better tennis shoe that's a disconnect that needs to be addressed.

Working together was another challenge that is often poorly addressed, teams can get bogged down in communications channels, collaborative tools or simple file compatibility between tools they use. For example, using Adobe Creative Suite or even Microsoft Office across platforms or between different versions can cause nightmares if you don't plan carefully.

Finally the last concept we talked about was having mutual accountability in teams. In academic environments teams are rarely measured as TEAMS, it's till all about the individual. This represents a misalignment of incentives and good team work in an academic setting needs to make sure incentives are aligned.

We didn't stop with these concepts in the workshop however. We then moved on to understanding how some diagnostic tools could help us develop teams with complimentary skills and how to work effectively with those that are different than us. In future posts I'll discuss two techniques we used, one involving Meyers Briggs and the other involving a GREAT tool developed by a Business School Professor called the Creative Problem Solving Profile. Finally, we covered how to get teams 'unstuck' by exploring some concepts developed by Keith Yamashita and Sandra Spataro.

Design Process Round Table

At the About With and For conference at ID I had the pleasure of hosting a small round table where we discussed design process. The inspriation for the topic was a story on Design Observer by Michael Beruit.In the article Michael hightlights what he TELLS customers his process is versus what it really is. While Michael is focused more in traditional print design I strongly suspect that much of what he discusses also occurs in interaction design.

The issue really boils down to a discussion about what type of design we actually engage in and we can use some concepts from Dan Saffer's Designing for Interaction to Frame the Discussion. In Michael's case he actually pitched activity-based design and then most often wound up practicing genius-based design. I suspect most interaction desigers pitch activity-based or user centered design as there process but then eventually get to the point where they practice genius-based design as well.

In our round table we all acknowledged that projects rarely get executed with the aplomb that is promised at project inception and that we often rely on our experience and intuition to make things happen--often to the exclusion of some of the procedural or conceptual steps that we would normally engage in.

In fact, many companies (Apple comes to mind) have established extroadinary success by focusing on genius-based design. This is troubling. Genius-based design doesn't scale, it also doesn't allow for continuity or consistency. Apple makes beautiful products with that 'gotta-have' factor but there are also some things that missing. For those of you that built or developed Apple applications long ago the Apple Human Interface Guidelines where canonical, applications all behaved as you expected them too, this is much less true of Apple products today. This manner of designing also doesn't lend itself well to integration. Try pasting something from Pages or iDVD into Keynote for example.

Another company that focuses more on what I'd consider genius-based design is 37 Signals. They too make beautiful software and often focus on what 'feels' right versus research.

And herein is the dilemma. Intuition and genius-based design works, we need to acknowledge it and explain it to our customers and patron rather than hiding behind a lie. But we also need to acknowledge where it falls short. Complex problems often require and can benefit from from a rigerous approach to process and contextual inquiry it's our job as professionals to ensure that we apply all flavors of our discipline in appropriate measures.

The key concepts to come out of our round table is that method-based design does not do a good job of acknowledging the intuitive part of the process and it must.The other concept is that we must work on giving our profession some established patterns and process that inform a more agile and iterative approach to contextual inquiry and systemic design because nothing will hurt or discredit our profession more than if we SAY we are practicing systemmic design when we are in fact, just making things up as we go.

The Office 07 Road Test

In addition to running Vista on a tablet pc I'm also running Office 07. Office 07 represents a departure in terms of interface. One of the biggest challenges that Office presents users with is its complexity. New market entrants have thought to address this by offering streamlined versions of applications that offer a subset of core office functionality.

However, Office 07 intends to give users the best of  both worlds, deep features and ease of use with a re-imagined interface that is focused on context. I suspect that the collaboration features of Office 07 and the future integration with Office Live are going enhance the way we work in collaboration, perhaps in ways we haven't even thought about yet.

First impressions

I haven't dug into the new office too deeply yet. However, I have been using the new Outlook and I must say that one of the things that impresses me about it (at least in terms of how Microsoft configures it for me as an employee) is how easy it is to access Outlook. Office 07 Outlook offers some great productivity tools in terms of quickly sorting and turning emails into to dos and in terms of filing that seem useful to me as I try to practice my GTD techniques. Outlook, in conjunction with Office Communicator, allows my peers inside and outside of Microsoft to reach me much more easily than other systems I've used in the past. Let's see if this holds true over the next few weeks and I dig deeper.

What to Read: A Designers Checklist You've Never Seen

There are lots of wonderful books for designers to read but I think one of the most important things for designers to do is READ WHAT EVERYONE ELSE DOES too. Why? To understand the trends and stories that shape all of us, to develop the skills to discuss these concepts and your trade and vocation in a common language.

I'd start with these:

The Wall Street Journal

The Economist

BusinessWeek

An online subscription to the Journal should do so your designer and developer friends won't beat you with sticks when you pull it out of your messenger bag but dead-lead versions of BusinessWeek and The Economist are better.

BusinessWeek is kind of like the People Magazine of the business world, but it gives you a good overview of what the business world is thinking about and Bruce Nussbaum has done a fantastic job of getting the topic of design and innovation in front of business.

Reading the Economist often feels like hard work (and it is) but imagine how emboldened you'll feel when you can talk about the influence the Chinese Bond market has on North American mortgage prices at a party. (Actually, I made that last part up and I guess you can do that without actually reading the Economist, but if you want to be authentic get it, read it.)

One other thing I've taken to doing lately is using the new NYT Times Reader to read The Gray Lady on the train when I go into town.

Phaidon Design Classics

One of the treats I gave myself when I completed the latest (and my wife says the LAST) graduate degree was to purchase a big, showy table top book on design. I went all out this year and got the Phaidon Design classics, a classification of 999 objects in three glorious bound volumes. I expected to do to this collection what I do with all my others, read them voraciously for a day and then put them up on a shelf with the other books on Swiss Design, The Bauhaus, and Paul Rand.

But I surprised myself with this collection. I actually keep in my home office close to my four computers (Computers are like cats to a geek if you must know and I have a two Macs and three PCs). I find myself grabbing a volume about twice a week and reading in depth about one of the objects detailed. Are they an expensive luxury? Sure. But the inspiration they bring to me makes it worth it.

Once every few weeks I'll pull out an object featured in the books and talk about it here. We forget that as much as we are surrounded by bad design every day we are also surrounded by beautiful and sublime design. This collection reminds me of that and helps me SEE it in my daily surroundings.

The Vista Road Test

Those of you that are active Windows users or have even a passing fancy in the comings and goings of Microsoft might be aware that Microsoft's next operating system, Vista, will be released by year end for business customers and in early 07 in consumer versions. I'm running a release candidate of Vista on a Toshiba Tablet PC right now. Much like Car and Driver does with an automobile I'll be posting about my impressions with Vista compared to other (ahem) similar operating systems.

First thoughts

Vista is clearly a Windows system, but at first glance a vastly improved one. It looks pretty and elegant and for most users it will hide and or automate routine set up functions, making set up a breeze. Vista is also nice to look at, and Aero is a neat effect. When I was using the interface on the train a few days ago to go into work I had a few people ask me what OS I was using (probably because I was using the New York Times reader software). It also runs surprising well on a tablet pc considering the modest graphics capabilities of the machine I was using.

Poke under the covers however and you'll see many familiar screens from the typical Windows OS, this is good and bad I think. The learning curve on Vista is minimal. If you 'get' Windows, you'll get Vista, but if you were ever confused when you had to roll up your sleeves to bang on a Windows configuration Vista won't change things, it will still be a bit intimidating. I suspect that this will rarely be the case for most users as things are very automated, the only time I had to get in the weeds was to configure a smart card and some VPN software, because I configured this the same way on XP as I did in Windows it was straight forward. Some of my more progressive human factors peers might even clarify that as a feature, so users don't have to figure out too much new stuff at once.

My other minor challenges were updating some driver software for the machine and this also breaks the continuity of the experience a bit because of compatibility. Some installers look prettier than others and installation is more straight forward, but all in all no fatal crashes or hiccups. (However, I expect that by the time Vista ships that this will happen automatically for most users.)

One of the most impressive features of Vista after playing with it for a few hours are how it creates a very seamless and elegant tablet computing experience. Typography renders beautifully on the system and the way the system responds to Tablet based input is smooth and intuitive. After using both PCs and Macs with Wacom tablets for years I must say I'm impressed with Tablet PCs in general and like the experience even more with Vista. Vista has its own feel and it's definitely different than a Mac experience. All in all I expect the learning curve on Vista coming from XP or other Windows systems will be lower than it was for users that went from OS9 to OSX on the Mac side of things.

I think the real test will be how the system fairs with Office 07 and many of the Web-based services that we've come to rely on it. Future posts will address my experiences in those areas and compare and contrast how they are different form experiences using Office 03 and Web services from Google, Yahoo and Live. More to come...

About With and For

About With and For has the distinction of being one of the better student run design conferences being held today and typically has a focus on user research. I'll be attending this year and hosting a roundtable on design process and language. I'll post my thoughts on the conference here next week.

If your there look me up or give me a call.